Vision & Goals

Run by volunteers committed towards creating new ecological conditions to mitigate environmental—biological, social and cultural—deterioration, Śuddha: Khushi Parisara is a registered Society  [UKK-S234-2015-16] of persons from diverse backgrounds with a shared concern for their environment.

Śuddha: Khushi Parisara aims to create a platform to promote environmental literacy by enabling application of strategies to reduce, reuse, and recycle resources, and for the betterment of the environment.

Starting its mission in Alvedande, Kumta and Gokarna, Khushi Parisara believes that local people assisted with good sustenance are powerfully capable of tackling their severe environmental issues of sanitary and waste management in the best and most innovative way, apt to become a model in Uttara Kannada to trigger further action in the entire District.
Khushi Parisara considers that the reasons behind the excess of malinya parisara (environmental pollution) do not result from the high population density, but from ignorance (avidya); it is not because there is bad or ill will, but because there is unmindfulness and unawareness.

In order to reduce and eradicate malinya parisara, it is necessary to update or provide the required knowledge. Natural goodwill, care, and investment will bring resolve for remediation.
We can only find and implement solutions once we understand the causes of deterioration and act upon them.
When we see the suffering, harm, and dosha we have caused unknowingly and unwillingly, our
generous nature will immediately develop the right action. Gradually, the needed corrections will be made.
Our projects foster the population’s wisdom on how to find individual, collective and global solutions, and putting them into practice.
A protective approach to environment will lead all of us to examine our actions and their consequences, recognising that certain habits are harmful. We will want our basic goodwill to be more than just an idea, so we can apply it scrupulously in every situation possible.
Inevitably, that goodwill will have a noticeable impact.
Based on this, it is all about developing new good practices, efficiently adjusted to the precarious environmental context.

Change starts right here, right now!

 

KHUSHI PARISARA debut

Because the core of our working team is from a lifetime educational background, it is easy to realize that we back all the needful behavioural change on the power of imparting knowledge, understanding, motivation.

Since the first moment on the ground, we always pivot around the educational support, fully subscribing the unavoidability of IEC, and we have tried extremely hard to provide adjusted tools [most of them available at our website]. Hence, after identifying and appraising the main snags, we have supplied outreach tools, methods, material, information, plans, guidelines, proposals, to draw and implement change-making programs, trying to go beyond the scope of conventional solutions.

Moreover, knowing from groundwork that without a comprehensive and detailed appraisal of the impaired context, any move towards a systemic approach to tackle and solve it will be crushed and lost, we have delivered several assessments of different places, circumstances, networks.

Yet, if we can contribute in these modes, we cannot replace the responsible authorities on their duties to identify the issues that need to be faced and to take the needful action

BECAUSE

we are not assigned a post, a duty, a function,

we are not elected to represent a community, a corporation, a region,

we are not allotted a salary, an honorary, a fund, a donation…

 

  1. We are just a society of eco-denizens, volunteers, whose activity aims to protect our natural resources, prioritizing them in all situations and contexts, requiring our governance to protect and value them – what is undeniably also expected from our Public Servants.

We want to involve intensely all-possible stakeholders, beyond political, cultural, social, economic variances, in order to implement URGENT and incontrovertible measures for good environmental governance, with exemplary punishment of all breaches of rules.

  1. We recognize that the local notorious environmental disaster, with its explicit points of erosion, mainly caused by wastes mismanagement, is grounded on

a) an intense and widespread local environmental illiteracy of governors

b) a blatant lack of enforcement of environmental laws

3. Considered this state of danger, our Group has been acting, and wants to keep acting, in two ways:

  • Identify/Access/Report all situations of irresponsible governance and environmental mismanagement (whether public or private)
  • Promote ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION of civil society, with special emphasis on governors, inviting them to understand the drama of reaching the alarming limit of environmental ruin, and the necessity to minimize its impact, for which we want and need to promote capacity building for strategic environmental vision of local bodies, boosting representatives and managers to entrench consistent change in 3 main segments:
      • environmental literacy of elected bodies
      • environmental instruction of administration
      • environmental education of the public

 

KHUSHI PARISARA memorandum

1. From our grassroots work, we know now that to educate and to change the behavioural pattern of common people is easier and more accessible than to make governors and managers JUST do their duty – just implement responsible environmental governance and management.

The wretched failure to keep our natural capital brought by environment breakdown, can no longer be acceptable; situations of criminally negligent governance cannot last or exist, or emerge, anymore. It is also why a very stern enforcement of all legally framed environmental rules and procedures is required.

2.  After several years investing our skills, time, movements, choices, diversified investments on the environmental issues related to marine pollution inland generated; after several years of approaching Public Servants for tackling those issues, within the authority assigned to them for the implementation of rules (namely waste related ones); after several years of producing, sharing and displaying IEC tools, guidelines, assessments, proposals; it became clear at a given point of our endeavor that, when it comes to implement the necessary changes to revert the current environmental degradation, direct groundwork is completely invalidated and destroyed by the inaction of public servants (both from the bureaucrat governing bodies, as from the floating population of elected members), and an extraordinary move is required to break through their inertia and heedlessness.

It is not simply necessary to educate the ‘public’. Education has to start from the statutory authorities in order to avoid their failure to protect the environment. We need to overcome ignorance and indifference of officers. We need to impart knowledge and motivation to officers. We need environmental capacity building to change behavior of officers.

3. The NGT order 606/2018, with the creation of State Level Committees, brought directions to change the local play, unequivocally stating that “the rule of law has to be upheld, the State itself being liable for its failure to perform duties in upholding environmental norms.”

However, as the application/enforcement of NGT orders is supposed to be done by the same officers that are already not knowing, not respecting, nor implementing the law, threatening its proficiency, an unprecedented environmental education venture is required. Constantly this issue is highlighted at the NGT meetings.

4. Attuned, our Strategy bets on ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION – formal and informal – to:

    • institute a fundamental “Trash Change” in the way people relate to wasteS, embracing all places, all levels, all segments of the population with a particular focus on statutory authorities
    • eliminate all detrimental Environmental Practices through Education, Monitoring and Penalty (EMP), with the help of concerned bodies.

5. BUT, the environmental disaster that we are living requires frontrunners with special knowledge, special experience, special skills not only to draw local (Taluk wise) strategic plans to protect the environment, but also to instruct, to educate, to raise awareness, to sensitize all the Officers that are, in a way or another, in position to harm natural habitats or natural conditions, by doings – or no-doings. To reverse this impaired condition, where civic servants and regulatory authorities are unable to accomplish their duties, it is crucial the assignment of environmental experts, experienced, knowledgeable, skilled, resolute, connoisseurs of the local issues.

[more]

KP Memorandum 2022